Comedian and actor Ronny Chieng delivered one of the most memorable Harvard Class Day addresses in recent memory. The Crazy Rich Asians star walked onto the stage and immediately floored the graduating class of 2026. His speech blended sharp humor with a surprisingly urgent message about artificial intelligence (AI).
The crowd responded with thunderous applause throughout. By the end, Chieng impressed some of the brightest young minds in the world.
Chieng wasted no time establishing his position on . “F*** AI,” he declared, three times in a row. The graduates erupted.
“I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI. Kill it,” he said.
The comedian admitted he had prepared a completely different speech just in case the crowd disagreed. He would not need it.
He immediately launched into jokes at AI’s expense. He said he had asked AI for the fastest route from New York City to Harvard. It told him to take FlixBus. “I’m a movie star,” he shot back. “I don’t take the bus. Acela only.” The hall roared with laughter.
He then pointed out what AI was allegedly saying about Harvard. According to Chieng, AI claimed Harvard had a $56.9 billion endowment. It also claimed the Harvard Graduate Students Union was striking for a livable wage of $25 an hour.
“There’s no way that’s true,” he deadpanned. “How bad are these AI hallucinations getting?”
The graduates, who knew the figures were accurate, laughed even harder.
Chieng’s central argument arrived wrapped in a Terminator 2 metaphor. He told the graduates that their generation’s true mission was not to “master AI for the future.” Their mission was to destroy it. The crowd clapped loudly in agreement.
“To accomplish this, you’ll have to capture and reprogram an AI to be on the side of humanity,” he said. They would then need to commandeer its time-traveling technology and send it back to defeat the current AI before it gains sentience.
“This isn’t just graduation day,” Chieng declared. “This is Terminator 2 Judgment Day.”
He briefly acknowledged the obvious objection. Someone in the crowd, he predicted, would ask about AI’s role in medical and physics breakthroughs.
His response was instant: “Shut up, nerd! I’m not talking about that.”
The laughter was deafening. He clarified that he was talking about the accumulation of “cognitive debt” from excessive use of large language models. He cited a 2025 MIT study published in Archive to back his point. He then took a dig at MIT itself, drawing cheers from the Harvard crowd.
Dumb People and AI
Chieng’s sharpest observations came when he described how mediocre people were already misusing AI. He did an impression of someone bragging about AI reading, summarizing, and responding to their emails.
“You know who else can do that? Me,” he said. “How useless are you? Do you need artificial intelligence just to match me?” The applause was immediate and sustained.
He argued that getting a real advantage from AI required a “minimum escape velocity of intelligence.” He told the Harvard graduates they likely had it. Everyone else, he warned, was simply going to get dumber.
“And that’s when you run up the score on them,” he said, to more cheers.
‘The Creating Is the Fun Part’
The speech shifted tone when Chieng spoke about his own craft. He described the joy of figuring out the “puzzle pieces” of a joke. He said the self-regard from accomplishing something difficult was irreplaceable. Why would he want AI to take that away?
He used a personal anecdote to land the point. He tried to introduce a friend to Buddhism through a book called Buddhism Made Simple. Instead of reading it, the friend used to summarize it in ten seconds.
“He didn’t reach enlightenment,” Chieng said. “Turns out speedrunning Buddhism is completely missing the point.” The room burst into applause again.
“The journey isn’t just how we acquire skills,” Chieng said, his tone turning sincere. “The journey is the point of all this.”
He paused, then said, “Maybe the real Harvard was the friends we made along the way.” The crowd loved it.
Chieng framed the real battle ahead in stark terms. It would not be humans against AI. “That’s at least two months away,” he quipped.
The real fight, according to him, would be between people with substance and people with shallow knowledge. It would be mastery versus faking it. It would be people with good taste versus the tacky.
“I trust you will put in the work to be on the right side of those battles,” he told the graduates. The applause that followed was among the loudest of the afternoon.
On Money
Chieng closed with a barrage of rapid-fire life advice. He told graduates to make sure their offline world was better than their online one. He told them to hug their parents.
He told them that “when someone invites you to a , always say no.” Everyone knew who he was referring to.
The actor told them that being cynical was not a sign of intelligence. He reminded them that money was easy for Harvard graduates.
“You can tell d*ck jokes on TV. You can run a crypto scam.” But he urged them not to chase it blindly. “Tackle the world’s problems,” he said. “Like hunger, access to education, or microplastics in our b*lls.”
His final message was the most sincere. When you have clarity of purpose and do something you love, he said, every day can be a joy. That joy spreads to others. And if none of that works out? “You can always just work for McKinsey.”
The graduates gave him another thunderous round of applause.
